The Spies Behind the Spies

Long before the planet went gaga over the film ARGO, I was fixated on Tony Mendez…

Antonio J. Mendez, a soft-spoken, nondescript, nice-guy operative — in the world of espionage, known to the head honchos of the CIA, and other world-class agencies, as "the Master of Disguise."

Tony, an undisputed genius, could create an entirely new identity for Anybody! Anywhere! Anytime!

Combining the cunning tricks of a magician with the analytical insight of an expert psychologist, he saved hundreds of men and women from death — or perhaps worse — by his talents.

He earned the CIA's Intelligence Star for planning the escape of The Famous 6 Americans from Tehran in 1980.

On the 50th Anniversary of the CIA, Tony was named one of the 50 all-time stars of the "spy trade" and is known to be one of the highest levels performers EVER in international espionage!

A former plumber and illustrator from Eureka, Nevada, Tony rose to be the Chief of Disguise of the CIA's technical services staff.

An expert in East Asian spycraft, Mendez masterminded much of the Cold War intrigue in Moscow, as a disguise specialist in the CIA Office of Technical Services. He also helped develop and deploy espionage gadgets — including a low-light camera used during the first moon landing and miniature lithium batteries that were the predecessors of batteries used in modern portable electronics.

Appointed Chief of their Graphics and Authoritative Division, he helped transform the identity of CIA field operations, by supplying them with high-level forged documentation for use in field missions.

Tony married his colleague of 27 years, Jonna Goeser, who was a camera expert and who also trained CIA officers in the use of Covert Technologies. They now live in Maryland.

After their retirement, the husband-and-wife team were called by the Agency to enter the lecture circuit and chronicle their undercover careers in places like Germany, India and Thailand, in an effort to "humanize" the secretive Agency.

Their book SPY DUST recounts their intelligence work in the USSR in the 1980s.

If you share my fascination with the spycraft of these two people, I suggest you read The Master of Disguise, by Tony Mendez and Spy Dust, by Antonio and Jonna Mendez.

Thelma Jacqueline Straw

P.S. I wonder if these two experts are doing any undercover work or advisory functions today, in this maelstrom of international spydom!!!

A Role Model for Crime Writers… The Real ARGO Guy!

One man stands out in the shadow world of spy trade. Antonio Joseph Mendez.

Tony led two lives. A gentle, soft-spoken guy, a born artist, now retired and doing his painting in the Maryland Blue Ridge Mountains, he became THE master of disguise.

You may know of him now as the real life engineer of the escape of six fellow Americans from Tehran in 1980.

Partly because of the Oscars, America has been gaga over the word ARGO in 2013. It all began with a modest, talented man born in 1940 in Eureka, an old mining town in the Diamond Mountains of central Nevada.

Quiet. Gentle. But things are seldom what they seem…

Tony worked the night shift at Martin Marietta as an artist/illustrator. This job led him to the Technical Services Division of the CIA. And the rest is history!

At the CIA he was known as the undisputed master of disguises, who was both magician and psychologist. History knows him as the engineer of the masterful escape in 1980 of six brave American citizens from Tehran via Swissair Flight 363, a DC-8 named " ARGAU".

In 1979 Tony had been named Chief of Authentication for the Graphics and Authentication Division of the Office of Technical Services. He was responsible for disguise, false documentation and counterintelligence forensic examination of questioned (possibly forged) documents and materials. Where his friends saw him as a soft-spoken, nondescript bureaucrat, the top guns at Langley HQ saw him as their master of disguise, an "undisputed genius who could create and entirely new ID for anybody, anywhere, anytime."

He was a magician with the analytical insight of a shrink. Bob Gates, the former head of CIA, said of him," He was one of the most imaginative and courageous unsung heroes..." A former chair of the CIA Publications Review Board said of him, "Tom Clancy would be hard-pressed to envision what Tony Mendez has done…"

In his own words, Tony wrote, "I served as professional intelligence officer, creating and deploying many of the most innovative techniques of the espionage trade…. Those who know me best will realize that I would never knowingly betray a trust or reveal a secret that would jeopardize a comrade, a source, or my country's interests."

I became interested in the story of Tony Mendez 13 years ago, never thinking he would be the hero of an Oscar film award today! He was one of many "creative problem solvers", one of my heroes, whose careers inspired me to try my hand at spy novels.

I read all I could find on Tony, and recently I found a little niche for this guy in my WIP, as a close friend of POTUS, the President of the United States, who finds the White House upstairs too confining, and asks his old pal, Tony Mendez, to create a disguise for him to get outside the walls of the big house occasionally, to breathe fresh air and go among the real people! (Ah, the glorious liberties fiction gives the crime writer, provided you play fair!)

After decades of imaginative jobs, Tony was assigned the job that brought him into the 2013 spotlight, the chaos of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, triggered by the Islamist fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers.

The valued Iranian agent named "Raptor" was key to a rescue situation of American diplomats that years later would be the topic of worldwide cinema with our friend Tony as the mastermind of the historic rescue.

The name of the venture was to be ARGO, a contraction of " Ah, go f*** yourself!" We'll never know the real story, I feel, but Tony gives us a good yarn that will keep us intrigued for many decades.

My own feeling about this charming, gifted man, is that with so much bubbling in the world's cauldron, it is quite possible he'll be called back for duty. The world could use his gifts once more!!!

Thelma Straw

The Espionage Thriller: Post-War and Post-9/11

Al and I have been friends for two decades; we met in a writer’s group (where else?) along with Theasa Tuohy. Being a newspaper man by profession, Al’s a fast writer and with an imagination that works at warp speed, he already has a back list awaiting publication. 

After serving with the Army overseas, Albert Ashforth worked for two newspapers. He is the author of three books, numerous stories and articles. His espionage thriller, THE RENDITION, was described by a reviewer as "smoothly written, fast-moving and suspenseful." He is a professor at SUNY and lives in New York City. -Robert Knightly

---

The espionage novel is a relatively narrow literary genre, and as the world political situation over the last 70 years has gone from bad to worse and back again, the fortunes of the espionage novel have also see-sawed up and down – but with a difference. When the world’s political situation takes a turn for the worse, the situation of espionage novels takes a turn for the better. And vice-versa.

During the 1920’s the State Department established an office responsible for breaking codes and reading messages sent between other nation’s embassies and their capitals. It was our country’s first attempt to establish an intelligence agency. But when Henry L. Stimson, then Secretary of State, learned what the office was doing, he immediately had it closed down and famously said, “Gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail!”

Espionage novels could hardly be written in a time when national leaders regarded one another as gentlemen. Needless to say, things changed with the arrival on the world stage of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, both of whom began throwing their weight around during the 1930’s. It was hardly a coincidence that three early and successful writers of espionage novels, Eric Ambler, Helen MacIness and John Buchan, also emerged around this time.

Before the 1930’s, very few espionage thrillers were written, and it is easy to see why. In order to have spy novels you have to have spies, and the United States didn’t establish the OSS, the precursor of the CIA, until 1944. Something else you need is a tense international situation. You need a foreign government readers really dislike in order to make the gritty, distasteful job of spying acceptable. First Nazi Germany and then Communist Russia filled that bill very nicely. The Cold War provided both spies and a fierce rivalry, and as the United States and Russia competed against each other with every means at hand short of going to war, espionage – the KGB versus the CIA – was the obvious way to try and beat out your rival. The result was that the last six or seven decades have been a truly great time for the writers of international spy thrillers.

Although Ian Fleming’s charismatic James Bond is the best known intelligence agent of the Cold War years, John le Carré’s rather drab George Smiley is the most realistic.

Alex Klear, the hero of my novel, The Rendition, also began his career during the Cold War, and he is closer to Smiley than to Bond. He recalls spending much of his time doing the same gritty, dangerous job that many of our intelligence people stationed in Europe did during those years: recruiting and running spies behind the Iron Curtain. Although governments sanctimoniously maintain that the spies they recruit from the other side are motivated by ideological beliefs, the truth is that most come over because they’ve had their arms twisted – in other words, they’ve been blackmailed. Alex and his partner, Buck, often acting on information supplied by the National Security Agency, did the twisting, first recruiting and then running their agents for as long as they could provide useful information. But Alex, who is fluent in German and knows some Russian, finds he is an anachronism after November 1989, the month in which the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. With Russia no longer an enemy, Alex realizes he is no longer needed, and decides to retire.

Although the world cheered the disappearance of the Wall, which was the perfect symbol of Communist oppression, espionage writers didn’t. One espionage writer, Len Deighton, was forced to make last-minute changes to a novel about Berlin, Spy Sinker, but he wasn’t the only espionage writer caught by surprise by this sudden development. The blunt truth is, when world tensions decline, so do the fortunes of spy novelists. During the 1990’s, with borders now open and old rivals becoming trading partners, there were no jobs for spies and no enemies to justify the betrayals and dirty tricks which are part and parcel of espionage thrillers. During the 1990’s, espionage writers had to find new topics to write about.

But with the attack on the World Trade Center things changed yet again. Not since the demise of Hitler and Stalin have espionage writers had such a hated figure as Osama bin Laden. Once again, the end could justify the means, and we could again start opening each other’s mail.

In the years since 9/11, one development in particular has helped make espionage thrillers more popular and more significant. Our government has become tight-lipped. Although the public knows we are fighting a war on terror for which we are spending hundreds of billions, there is very little information about it in the newspapers. Savvy readers are discovering that one of the best sources for finding out what’s going on is the spy thriller, which can take them places even newspaper correspondents can’t go.

For example: Let’s suppose the American ambassador to Afghanistan were to meet with President Karzai to discuss some kind of crisis. If news people are denied access, they can only report that the meeting took place. They can’t make up quotes or write anything they don’t know to be true. The writer of fiction, however, can imagine what the two men might have spoken about and describe a stormy exchange with the president raising his voice and the ambassador storming out of the palace. If the writer has done his job well, he might well have given a roughly accurate representation of what actually happened, and there is nothing to prevent him from connecting the meeting to a subsequent real political development which might involve his hero and heroine. And he could go on from there. The thriller writer is limited only by his imagination and his knowledge of the topic.

And believe me, most thriller writers are experts in the areas they write about.

Since the publication of The Rendition, I have had any number of people ask me, “Say, what is a rendition anyway? Isn’t that when somebody sings a song?”

Well, it used to be, but now the term has an additional meaning, one coined by our intelligence agencies probably because of its lack of either good or evil connotations.

Since 9/11, our government has unleashed a bag of dirty tricks aimed at making life miserable for those who would do us harm. One trick involves kidnapping a terrorist from a foreign country where he might be strolling around openly and enjoying life to the fullest, secure in the belief he is beyond the reach of the American government. A “rendition” takes place when the terrorist, against his will, is snatched off the street or perhaps even grabbed in his home, as one target actually was. In all likelihood, he is transported to a nation friendly to the United States, where he is subjected to “enhanced interrogation,” which means his captors use methods for extracting information that are not permissible in the United States or under the Geneva Convention. Probably the friendly nation passes this information back to us, and we go after more terrorists.

Although Secretary Stimson would be in shock were he to see what’s going on today, we thriller writers are in seventh heaven. In addition to carrying out renditions, our government attacks other nations with drones, hacks into other nations’ computer systems and conducts “black ops.”

When the government doesn’t want to be held responsible for undertaking certain kinds of dirty tricks, it sometimes sanctions a “black” operation, in other words an operation that lacks all traces of government involvement. This is fine as long as things go smoothly, but when they go awry and the government invokes “plausible denial,” it’s nearly always our intelligence officers who find themselves holding the bag. In such cases, they have roughly the same standing with a foreign government that a bounty hunter might have -- in other words, none -- and this is the predicament in which Alex finds himself when the rendition he is involved in goes off the rails.

In the course of the story, Alex bugs a phone, breaks into someone’s home, helps a guy escape jail and of course takes part in a couple of renditions. Although under Secretary Stimson’s definition, he would hardly qualify as a “gentleman,” he makes the grade as a warrior and a survivor.

Albert Ashforth

The Second Oldest Profession

The role of the female spy is as old as recorded history. As children we read how Delilah betrayed Samson to the Philistines.

Empress Wu Chao, A.D. 625-705, set up a Chinese sovereign-controlled secret service. High priestesses at Delphi are credited with passing on intelligence while in drug-induced trances.

The Byzantine Empress Theodora danced nude while her spies worked the streets.

In the 16th century Q E 1 brought the art of espionage to an international level.

Women were active spies in the American Revolution. Patience Mehitabel Lovell Wright, an American sculptress, a confidant of Ben Franklin, served as a valuable intelligence agent in London and passed information to Franklin.

The Civil War had Belle Boyd and Nancy Hart, "Rebel Rose" Greenhow, the widow of a state department official who also served as a secret executive agent for the U.S. Rebel Rose was a capitol confidant of statesmen, congressmen, army and navy officers stationed in Washington.She penetrated Union Lines through her very effective courier service, sending intelligence to Richmond that Gen. Irvin McDowell was marching on Manassas, VA. Her timely ciphered message set the stage for the Union debacle at Bull Run in 1861.

On the Union side, a Quaker teacher in Winchester, VA, Miss Rebecca Wright, and Gen. P.H. Sheridan worked through an elderly black man who had a confederate pass to sell vegetables in the town - with messages on tissue paper, wrapped in tin foil and secreted in the man's mouth!

Miss Elizabeth van Lew, a spinster in Richmond, led a double life. Under the guise of a partying busybody, she eavesdropped on military conversations, sent coded messages back to Union posts and hid northern prisoners in her James River Mansion.

A Creole actress, Pauline Cushman of New Orleans, transmitted intelligence on military attacks to the Yankees.

A war widow, Sarah Thompson, helped in the capture of the famous Dixie Major John Hunt Morgan.

Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, a prisoner of war, was awarded the Medal of Honor, for service to the Union forces in 1865.

Spy fever spread across the U.S. in WW1. Signs were posted on the Brooklyn docks: "Beware of female spies!"

Femmes fatales with German accents were eliciting secrets in New York's high society. Even bird watchers along the coast were suspect.

Maria de Victorica, known as Baroness Kretschmann, Marie de Vussiere or Miss Clark, in 1917 organized spy rings, sabotaged ships and munitions factories, worked sub rosa from the Netherlands Hotel for the German Nachrichtendienst.

American officers uncovered her work in re-supplying German U-boats off Cape Hatteras, positioning spies on American and British ships and plots against the Panama Canal.

Admiral Sir Reginal "Blinker" Hall, director of British Naval Intelligence in WW1, hired ladies who were known as "Blinker's Beauty Chorus". They had to be able to speak two languages and type!

In the second great war, women worked for SOE, the British Special Operations Executive, OSS, the American Office of Strategic Services, and BCRA, the French Bureau Central de Reseignements et d'Action.

They also worked in Africa, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Poland, Portugal, Scandinavia, Asia and the Middle East.

Women managed the cryptography sections, infiltrated enemy lines to get tactical intelligence, published newspapers, managed guerilla operations and worked in "black" propaganda. Marlene Dietrich worked in radio for propaganda purposes.

Women taught weaponry, sabotage techniques and served in paramilitary units.

Many courageous French women worked in both world wars for intelligence or the resistance. Lee Child has several touching chapters in The Enemy, his book about Reacher's courageous mother and her work in this. The story of her funeral is very moving. Be sure to read it!

Over 4,000 women served in the OSS in WW2. General William Donovan called them "invisible apron strings." Women held jobs in administration, research and analysis. Jeannie Rousseau reported on Hitler's secret weapons. Rachel Griese compiled information on German defenses in France. Virginia Hall served in so many programs as a secret agent. Donovan awarded her the Distinguished Service Cross. After her work at OSS she joined the CIA.

Aline Griffith, Paige Morris, Isabel Pell, all made strong contributions to OSS in England, France and Spain.

Rosa Frame was a vital OSS agent in China and India.

Not all female OSS operatives gathered intelligence or blew up bridges. The MO branch of OSS, Morale Operations, dealt with black or covert propaganda. Their work included "all measures of subversion... used to create confusion and division, to undermine the morale and unity of the enemy."

In current tradecraft ... disinformation!

In post-war Germany, Emmy Rado, at OSS, worked with Allen Dulles on the highly secret "Crown Jewels" operation to coordinate churches in the German postwar rehab program.

In Japan, an OSS/MO woman planned the program to save the Emperor of Japan as a rallying point for the defeated nation. Her plan was adopted by Gen. MacArthur.

Under Stalin the NKVD set up Russia's first spy school in 1939, where actresses learned surveillance, ciphers and hand-to-hand combat, as well as the languages, culture and customs of the countries they infiltrated.

By 1971 there were hundreds of husband and wife teams in Russia. Anna Rosenberg, Jane Foster, and Martha Dodd Stern were indicted for espionage.

In Israel the Mossad was known for its excellent intelligence service. An agent code-named Cindy lured a prominent Israeli nuclear technician to Rome where he was picked up by the Mossad.

After 1947 the new Central Intelligence Agency hired many women from the old OSS. Women were promoted gradually to high positons, in operations and anti-terrorism.
William Colby, Director of the CIA from 1973-76, predicted then that one day a woman would be appointed head of CIA.

Many current mystery writers have women in various levels of the world of espionage. Thanks to the latitude of fiction, Zoe Bingham, with the looks of Helen Mirren and the will of the early Lady Thatcher, holds the position as head of CIA in my current series.

As a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers for over two decades, I recommend, however, that you read the books of our colleague, Vince Flynn, for the best portrayal of a woman head of CIA. His Dr. Irene Kennedy is shown, over about a dozen books, to be a woman of strength, erudition, culture - yet is one tough dame!

Thelma Straw